ABSTRACT
Jimmy Breslin remarked somewhere that the typical headline about Catholics in what he was pleased to call The New York Times Newspaper is "More Catholics Leaving Church than Ever." In much of the media coverage of the various crises in the Church, the assumption is the same as it was in the twenties and thirties of the centuries before last, the early days of American Nativism—the Catholic Church simply cannot survive in an open and democratic society. Catholics remain Catholic, despite unsatisfactory leaders and monumental mistakes, because they love the Sacraments, and community. Public education will undermine the superstition of the Catholic faith, the Catholic population will break with its foreign leadership, the immigrants will become Americans, and Catholicism in the United States will become only a distant memory.
